Bloomberg's Surveillance State

Mike Bloomberg Is Watching You. Get Used To It.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a man who wants a certain type of world, and he is willing to use what powers he has to achieve it. Fortunately for us, but perhaps unfortunately for the discussion, Bloomberg’s envisioned utopia is not warped and bellicose, like that of Kim Jong-un, nor it is nightmarish and corrupt, like that of Robert Mugabe.

Michael Bloomberg just wants what he sees as a safer, more responsible world; a world where people carry neither pistols nor Pall Malls, and where the purchase of giant sodas in cups featuring cartoon dinosaurs (in sunglasses) is substantially less common. Michael Bloomberg wants to make sure everything is under control, and everyone is living as ambitious, health-conscious New Yorkers generally live. Let’s call it the “Park Slope Consensus:” Michael Bloomberg wants to make sure you are safe (and skinny, and smoke-free), and he is willing to make sure that you follow through on this.

This latter part, of course, is to be achieved with cameras. And drones. And face-recognition software, of which Hizzoner speaks in the bland terms of technological inevitability. “You wait,” he told listeners of his radio show on Friday morning, “in five years, the technology is getting better, there’ll be cameras everyplace . . . whether you like it or not.”

First they came for the Big Gulps…

Why They Are Watching

What was interesting to us about Bloomberg’s on-air statements was the way that he evaded the moral questions relating to a surveillance society. There was no mention of the limits of government power, nor even the bland assurance that those who are doing nothing wrong will have nothing to fear. In the place of such bromides stood the somewhat rueful claim that “we’re going into a different world, uncharted, and […] what governments can do is different … you can’t keep the tides from coming in.”

As qualified and hesitant and aware-of-the-complexities as Mike Bloomberg sounded during this address, it couldn’t help but take on the tone of a directive, and in that sense it was both frightening and strikingly honest: Whatever new powers are made possible by emerging technologies, they will be used. Whether we like it or not.

Once powerful individuals start talking about what they can do, rather than what they should do, all manner of things become possible. In the second half of the twentieth century, after the devastation of two world wars and the nuclear bombing of two Japanese cities, we seemed to turn in terror and grief from the question of what was ultimately possible. This was the era that saw the creation of the United Nations, of the Fourth Geneva Convention and of the Cold War, that gained its name from the refusal of the United States and the USSR to engage in open, “hot” warfare because to do so would have meant the atomic destruction of the planet. In that context, it seemingly became necessary for states to speak openly of the limits they would place on themselves, and of the world that would be created were they to cease doing so.

A New Way Of Doing Things

That was a long time ago. We were younger then, and frightened of different things. Domestic drone surveillance, which is what Bloomberg is exhorting us to “get used to,” was conceived of as an anti-terrorist tool, and it was in this circumstance that Attorney General Eric Holder maintained that the killing of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil by a government drone would be both legal and justified.